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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

New Light on Eliot

New Light on Eliot

The critic of Eliot inevitably tends to regard him as an English rather than as an American poet. For Eliot has increasingly relied upon English literary and social tradition for the habitual context of his poetry. It is scarcely conceivable, for example, that The Cocktail Party could have been written by an indigenous New Englander. Yet his distinctive and nostalgic imagery is drawn in a large degree from his American childhood and early youth. And as Professor Musgrove’s able and minute comparison must convince us, his view of America has been determined in a far-reaching manner by his reaction to the works of Whitman, that ‘sea monster stranded on the shores of literature’.

A study of this kind can assist considerably to a full understanding of Eliot’s poetry. But one regrets that Professor Musgrove has confined himself in the main to textual comparisons. His discussion of the basic symbols held in common by Eliot and Whitman indicates the kind of book that he might have written if he had allowed himself to speculate more fully on the theme of nature symbolisms; and in his analysis of Eliot’s and Whitman’s opposing views of human society lies the germ of a fruitful comparison of English and American mores. One feels that he has written notes toward a thesis ratherpage 114 than the thesis itself. Nevertheless, the book is both valuable and stimulating. In particular, his final notes on Eliot’s debt to Tennyson are, to the best of my knowledge, a venture into virgin territory.

At times Professor Musgrove seems to take textual comparisons a little too far; but he protects himself with frank reservations; and plainly the main body of his comparison is valid. His work sheds new light on Eliot’s imagery and the non-doctrinal groundwork of Eliot’s thought.

1952 (58)